Rosetta Stone Autopsy

Two days ago it was warm enough to wake the flies. Now

it's snowing, light dusting like powdered sugar

over the gray and brown post-harvest landscape.

A spoonful of sugar, or so they say, though

as the barometer drops there's not enough sweetness

to go around. The blood slows, thickens, settles

into the veins …

                              geologic sediment

that will, in the later years after my death,

be excavated when the explanations

(eventually) become important. There will be rings

in the bones – evidence of warmth and cold that,

over the years spread to the vital organs:

the heart,

                     the liver,

                                              the spleen.

The story spun by inexperienced necrophiliac historians

will be one in which they are heroes

and in which the corpse on the slab

is nothing more than an anonymous preamble

to an inevitable greatness they will copiously describe

using strip mine style explanations,

and retrofitted possibilities limited by statistical models

that are inadequate to the taxonomic task

of reconstructing a memory...

because they lack the hieroglyphic key

they themselves destroyed when, 

upon finding flies the belly,

they slaughtered them without a second thought.